Hope and History: A Memoir of Tumultuous Times

HOPE AND HISTORY

A Memoir of Tumultuous Times

WILLIAM J. VANDEN HEUVEL

FOREWORD BY DOUGLAS BRINKLEY

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

In memory of my parents, Alberta and Joost vanden Heuvel and my sister, Jennie vanden Heuvel Hoechner and in loving dedication to my family:

Melinda

Katrina, Stephen & Nika; Wendy, Brad & Lila; Ashley, Alex, Nicholas, Felix & Isabelle; John, Marie-Noelle, Annabelle & Olivia; Carol, David, Megan & Daniel; Bruce, Judy, Bryan & Bobby; Carol, John & the Rochester clan

History says, don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

—Seamus Heaney, "The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes"

CONTENTS

Foreword by Douglas Brinkley

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Growing Up in the Age of Roosevelt

2. Heroes and Mentors: Roger Baldwin and William J. Wild Bill Donovan

3. RFK, Prince Edward County, and the Revolution for Justice

4. Prisons and Prisoners

5. The Carter Presidency and the United Nations

6. America and the Holocaust

7. The Roosevelt Legacy

8. Reflections on Years to Come

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

Something about Bill vanden Heuvel always inspires me to do better, to care more deeply about American politics, the United Nations, human rights, and the eternal fight for social justice. The former ambassador, a brave and openhearted American patriot, has spent decades working to stamp out racial bigotry, solve refugee dislocation problems, and curtail systemic poverty all over the world. Vanden Heuvel has been a close friend of mine and mentor for over thirty years. We weekly share laughs about the absurdity of life, family dynamics, headline news, and academia, sometimes becoming our own two-person book club. Every time vanden Heuvel tells me a fresh story about leaders like Adlai Stevenson and Bill Clinton, or recounts being in the diplomatic trenches with William Wild Bill Donovan in the fifties, I lean forward. You will, too, when reading this elegant and riveting memoir of this diplomat extraordinaire. For vanden Heuvel is a brilliant raconteur, never flashing his cuffs, able to write in pitch-perfect prose about the constant pendulum swings of history and his own stellar contribution to the never-ending American parade.

The child of working-class European immigrant parents, raised in Rochester, New York, where the ghosts of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass loomed large, trained in the art of self-sufficiency in the California desertscape around Deep Springs, and minted in law at Cornell University, vanden Heuvel embodies the time-honored Horatio Alger tradition in spades. Handsome, debonair, whip-smart, fearless, physically fit, and a marvelous extrovert with a constant twinkle in his eye, vanden Heuvel’s calling cards are personal loyalty and bedrock integrity. He served in the US Air Force, ran for Congress, crusaded for prison reform, created the Roosevelt Study Center in the Netherlands, helped Thailand remain a democratic nation, marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Mississippi, advised Robert F. Kennedy as he ran for president in 1968, and served as Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva and New York—and all of this while maintaining a career as an international lawyer and investment banker. Always wanting to give back to the country he loves, a philanthropist and impresario of his time, vanden Heuvel is the most Rooseveltian person I know, always consumed with dynamic ideas about making America a more durable and equitable place. Aiming to fulfill Theodore Roosevelt’s sense of environmental stewardship, Franklin Roosevelt’s belief in the Four Freedoms, and Eleanor Roosevelt’s plea for the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, vanden Heuvel has traveled far and wide in the name of societal reform and global reconciliation.

As this memoir makes clear from the outset, a compassion for the underdog and down-and-outers has been steadfast throughout vanden Heuvel’s life. Not that he hasn’t lived the high life of a New York City cultural arbiter and foreign policy establishmentarian. But he has never let his professional success undermine his core New Deal philosophy of helping those most in need. In any given situation he offers an outstretched hand. In a time of crisis, he is a reliable counselor. In public forums his soliloquy is electrifying. There is nothing detached or cookie-cutter about him. With his shock of silver hair, horn-rimmed glasses, and hearty chuckle, he is the consummate Dutch uncle to scores of his friends. His intellectual greatness comes from cavernous caring, omnivorous reading, and daring real-life experience. Even though he epitomizes cosmopolitanism, he is at heart down-home. Witty without ever being caustic, sharp as a knife without the instinct to jab, he is an impressive reservoir of historical knowledge willing to be tapped when asked. Writing letters of recommendation comes easily for vanden Heuvel because he wants to see young people—and thereby America—succeed. Often he assumes the role of the gentleman spur, pushing friends and associates out of their cocoons to embrace the better angels of their nature. True liberty, he knows, from Valley Forge to Gettysburg to Selma, has been earned with blood and sweat. Attaining the promise of the Declaration of Independence is the primary civic duty, he insists, that righteous citizens must embrace.

So readers of this memoir are in for a treat. The prose is smooth yet direct, just like the ambassador himself. His eulogy for Roger Baldwin—founder of the American Civil Liberties Union—is worth the price of admission alone. There is an appealing onward thrust in these pages, superbly edited by the historian Jill Kastner, a PhD in history from Harvard University, that exudes a quick-minded nobility and hard-earned wisdom. In this Dark Age of Trump, the ambassador is a beacon of light. His ceaseless compassion is a rare commodity these days in the public arena. At every turn, he reminds us that the Bill of Rights and the Civil Rights Act must endure.

John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote: I have often thought as to who should be voted the best citizen of the United States—diligent, effective, intelligent and completely likable. It’s a hard question. But of one thing I am sure: a truly leading candidate is Bill vanden Heuvel. Who do you know that does so much that is good while inviting such affection? There may be others but my vote, however many times repeated with whatever legality, is for Bill.

What impresses me most about this memoir, in the end, is that our storyteller isn’t afraid to have sustainable heroes. With meticulous care he recalls Eleanor Roosevelt’s love of children, Jimmy Carter’s no-frills demeanor, and Bobby Kennedy’s fearlessness. Franklin Roosevelt is as alive here as the evergreens on his tree plantation at Hyde Park on the Hudson. The legacies of the New Deal and Great Society are championed with fresh appreciation from our urbane eyewitness. In our fast-paced, twenty-first-century world, laced with invective and snark, it’s lovely to read a wise voice of reason, decency, and genuine insight. If there is such a thing as an elder statesman, Bill vanden Heuvel is the all-seasons personification.

Douglas Brinkley

July 17, 2018

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Always quietly, always with clear vision and focus, and with an abiding belief that whatever my public legacy was worth, our children and family deserved a telling of it, Melinda encouraged the writing of this book and thereby enabled me to thank her for the love, support, and inspiration that brought it about.

Katrina vanden Heuvel was the architect. Deeply established in the media world, and the publisher and editor in chief of The Nation (America’s oldest political journal, established in 1865), she drew the blueprint. Her unfailing encouragement and participation made it happen—with sensitivity, generosity, and determination. Her aging father became her student and did his homework with the joy of love.

I first knew Jill Kastner as a brilliant doctoral candidate in history working with Ernest May at Harvard. I think of her as the executive director of this project, organizing it as though General Eisenhower asked her to handle the details of the D-Day invasion. She has been an extraordinary collaborator. For five months, our days would begin with a phone call from London setting the day’s work agenda, reviewing and editing drafts, encouraging the weary, drawing the blueprint that emerged from our deliberations, reading the endless oral histories that allowed the refreshment of memory. And then there is her personality—so thoughtful, effervescent, so kind, so capable of resolving obstacles, such a wonderful sense of humor. Praise is not enough. Thank you, dear Jill.

Barbara Nienaltowski, my personal assistant at Allen and Company, kept me mindful of my other responsibilities while completing Hope and History. I am not a master of the computer, but fortunately Barbara is—and further, she has a searching intelligence that made her a pivotal player in our project. Thoughtfulness and common sense are traits of Barbara that brought everything together. I am most grateful.

I acknowledge with profound appreciation the following friends and colleagues whose friendship and encouragement, one way or another, made this book possible:

Abe Beame, David Blum, Cornelis Boertien, James MacGregor Burns, Schuyler Chapin, Leo Cherne, John C. Culver, Colgate Darden, Arend de Ru, Norman Dorsen, Angier Biddle Duke, Robin Duke, Henry Fisher, John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert F. Gatje, Phil George, Richard Goodwin, Reverend Francis Griffin, Milton Gwirtzman, Ambassador Stéphane Hessel, Richard Holbrooke, Alistair Horne, Jacob and Marian Javits, Elmer Marker Johnson, Edward M. Kennedy, Miriam Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, John V. Lindsay, Gordon Moss, Sir James Murray, L. L. Nunn, Edgar de Picciotto, Maxwell Rabb, Camille Remacle, Roger Leon Remacle, Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., Arthur Ross, Stephen J. Ross, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Rudolph Schlesinger, Stephen E. Smith, Theodore Sorenson, Jean Stein, Lilian J. Stoneburg, Neil Sullivan, John V. Tunney, Cyrus Vance, John Whitehead, Simon N. Whitney, Milton A. Wolf, William Wolgast.

Herbert A. Allen, Bill Arnone, Wolfgang Aulitzky, Howard Axel and the Staff and Directors of the Four Freedoms Park Conservancy, Donald Beldock, Joan Bingham, Allida Black, Conrad Black, Janneke Boeser, Randolph Braham, John Brickman, Douglas Brinkley, Bartle Bull, Amanda Burden, Brian Burns, Joseph Califano, President and Mrs. Jimmy Carter, the Children of Prince Edward County, Robert Clark, Furio Colombo, Clark Copelin, David Cotner, Bert Cunningham and the Fighting 69th Infantry Regiment, Matilda Cuomo, Timothy DeWerff, Peter Duchin, Susan Dunn, Robert Dyson, Fred Eychaner and the Alphawood Foundation, Anne Ford, Robert Forrester, Peter Georgescu, Toni Goodale, Fredrica and Jack Goodman, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Vartan Gregorian, Jane and Lindsey Gruson, Howard and Consuelo Hertz, Kate Hughes, Nancy Ireland, Steven Isenberg, Denise Kahn, Nathaniel Kahn, Susan Kahn, Ethel Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy III, Kerry Kennedy, Victoria Kennedy, Youida Kerr, Susan and William Kinsolving, Dr. Henry Kissinger, Carolyn Klemm, Barbara Shattuck Kohn and Eugene Kohn, Sarah and Victor Kovner, Jay Kriegel, Ray Lamontagne, Bill Leuchtenburg, Richard Levy, Dan Lufkin, Priscilla McCord, Tom McGrath, Ambassador Donald F. McHenry, David Miliband and the Staff and Trustees of the International Rescue Committee, Sally Minard, Charles Moerdler, Robert Morgenthau, Bill and Judith Moyers, Kenneth Nochimson, Charles O’Byrne, Sidney Offit, Walter O’Hara, David Paterson, Eduardo Moises Peñalver, Katrina Pence, Robert Pennoyer, Charles T. Pinck and The OSS Society, Gina Pollara, Han Polman and the Roosevelt Foundation (The Netherlands), John Postley, Jennifer Raab and Harold Holzer and the Staff and Directors of Roosevelt House, Ene Riisna and James Greenfield, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., Elihu Rose, Janet Ross, Howard Rubenstein, Stephen Schlesinger, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, Herbert and Judith Schlosser, Stan Shuman, Seth Yossi Siegel, Elisabeth Sifton, Dean John Smith, Jean Kennedy Smith, Daisy Soros, Paul Sparrow and the extraordinary Staff and Trustees of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library, Elizabeth and George Stevens, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Cyrus Vance Jr., Enzo Viscusi, Robin Vrba, Lacy Ward Jr. and the Staff of the Moton Museum, Farmville, Virginia, Miner Warner, Warren Wechsler, Felicia Wong and Directors and Staff of the Roosevelt Institute, Andrew Young, Marlene Hess and James Zirin.

INTRODUCTION

We live in a world in which delete is far too easy. This fact compels us to be deliberate in what we save. What survives may not be important, but it is who we are. Memory fades, events unwind, the inevitable stamp of new generations covers over what we have built. Duff Cooper, the British statesman, entitled his memoir Old Men Forget. They do, but they also remember.

I am the son of immigrant parents. My mother was Belgian, already twenty-five when World War I began. Her schooling ended in the second grade. She had two sons whom she raised in the shadow of war. She lost her husband. Her dream was America. With her sons, four and six years old, she borrowed the fare for steerage, and with a courage and optimism that never left her, she landed at Ellis Island, en route to Rochester, New York. There she worked as a cleaning woman in an orphanage, never having time to learn English with the fluency that her young sons mastered in a matter of weeks. She opened a boardinghouse for Dutch workers who had also immigrated. She married my father, who worked as hard in a factory as any man I have ever known.

For my parents, to be American was the pinnacle of achievement. They never thought in terms of what they did not have. They always embraced the miracle of good fortune that allowed them to create a family deeply rooted in their new country.

My parents understood that education was the key to opportunity. I never forgot the teachers in our public school who removed the restraints of poverty and helped us realize our dreams. I stayed in touch with them, so they always knew the profound gratitude we felt.

Deep Springs College was the most important intellectual experience of my life. Located in a California desert valley, on the Nevada border not too distant from Death Valley, it isolated twenty-four chosen young men for two years of college education while learning also the responsibilities of labor and initiative. Its students truly ran, organized, and managed the ranch and the school. If you endured, you were welcome in any university. The principal option was one of the world’s great universities, Cornell, where the counterpart of Deep Springs existed in the form of Telluride House, which offered access to the opportunities of the university while creating a center of intellectual and cultural life on the Cornell campus. Professors and distinguished visitors often shared meals with us, and some lived at the house as well, including a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, Richard Feynman, and FDR’s secretary of labor, Frances Perkins. In due course, Cornell Law School prepared me for the profession I had made my ambition at an early age.

With this educational background, I encountered the world that the following pages describe.

I have been encouraged to believe that some of my public statements are worthy of continued reflection. In these fragments, I have remembered private hopes and public purposes. I hope to illuminate various themes I have encountered in public affairs, knowing that these major problems are never solved, but that each of us can affect them.

Contemporary problems have historic roots. The work of democracy is never finished. Each generation must formulate its own response to the challenges of its times.

Our words and deeds are crucial expressions of what we believe. What lies in the following pages is a select representation of my memories and reflections over a lifetime’s journey. Perhaps a new citizen or a grandchild or a dear young friend will find something in this chronicle to help strengthen and renew the possibilities of freedom and democracy that have meant so much to me.

1

GROWING UP IN THE AGE OF ROOSEVELT

I was born on April 14, 1930, in Rochester, New York, the son of Alberta and Joost vanden Heuvel, both immigrants to the United States. I was named for my paternal grandfather, William Jacobus vanden Heuvel, who was captain of a fishing boat and a religious zealot, championing the most conservative causes of the Dutch Reformed Church in his village and family.

My sister, Jennie, and I grew up in a boardinghouse owned and operated by my mother at 26 Mayberry Street in Rochester. The boarders were Dutch single men, recently arrived in America and working as gardeners for wealthy families, or as factory workers. The house had four bedrooms and an attic. We lived in close quarters. In addition to the eight boarders, who paid $7 a week for room, board, and access to the living room to listen to the radio, the house was home to me, my two half brothers, my sister, and my parents. Our family lived in the attic, which was badly heated—and Rochester had very cold winters. There was only one bathroom in the entire house.

My father came from Breskens, a village in the province of Zeeland, in the Netherlands. He was one of eighteen children. From the age of eight he worked for his father on a fishing boat in the North Sea. He would tell us stories of being strapped to the mast to avoid being blown overboard during fierce storms. He had a quick mind, a generous spirit, a natural love of children, and an affinity for beer. Essentially unschooled, he worked for twenty-five years as a laborer at the R.T. French Company, a manufacturer of mustard, owned by British interests. A man of slight build, he did the heavy labor of loading and unloading boxcars. For some years, he was a one-man manufacturer of birdseed in facilities so dusty that they resembled a London fog. During the Depression, he was laid off from time to time and was always fearful of losing his job. He never questioned management. When a union-organizing operation began, he asked me to see the British president of the company to explain that he would always be a loyal employee, that he was forever grateful for the opportunity of employment, and that he was a company man. On a summer break from college, I worked in the company laboratory earning $1.25 an hour, which was the wage my father was earning after twenty-five years of employment. The union prevailed that summer. I helped the organizers in every way I could and convinced my father that the company would be stronger if its workers were fairly paid. The union won. Within a year, the workers’ wages rose 50 percent.

My mother was born in the Belgian town of Lissewege, about ten kilometers from Bruges and today regarded as one of the most beautiful villages in Flanders. Her father was a farmer, his five children his workers. At age eleven, my mother was sent to work as a servant for a wealthy family in Bruges. Her experience helped me understand the novels of Charles Dickens. Poverty was a way of life. She was born in 1889 and was twenty-five when the German armies invaded Belgium in 1914. My mother, married to a baker, lived on the outskirts of the area later known as the battlefield of Ypres, where a million men would lose their lives before the war ended. She had her first son, Camille, in January of the year World War I began. Her second son, Leo, was born in 1916 and became a victim of rickets as a result of wartime malnutrition. My mother lost her husband, her home, and what little she owned. When the war ended, she borrowed $100 to buy passage in steerage, and sailed to America with her sons in hand. They were kept at Ellis Island for ten days while securing medical clearance. Once cleared, she boarded a bus to Rochester, New York, where her sponsor, an irascible brother, gave her temporary shelter while she looked for work. She found it—as a cleaning lady in a municipal orphanage.

My parents met in Rochester and were married in 1928. They spoke Dutch at home, as did we when we were children.

Part of my living memory was the meaning of immigration. Ellis Island became an epic story of heroism and determination. In later years when I served as the president of the International Rescue Committee, I often recalled the courage of those who, practically penniless, chose to leave their own country and settle in a place whose language they did not speak. My parents were in that last cycle of immigrants who could come to America uneducated and unskilled.

An old German immigrant loaned my mother the money that enabled her to buy the boardinghouse. There were many weeks we could not make the mortgage payments. How it pained my mother. In the end, she made certain that every borrowed dollar and its interest were paid.

For our circumstances, Rochester was a wonderful city in which to grow up. The philanthropy of George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak, was evident everywhere. The university, the hospitals, the music schools, the parks system, made George Eastman the benefactor of all of us. He killed himself in 1932, leaving a note saying, My work is done. Why wait? We schoolchildren were taught to remember the extraordinary generosity of his life. The Eastman Kodak Company at its peak employed over 45,000 people in Rochester. It was one of the great stories of industrial success in America.

When President Roosevelt declared a mortgage moratorium, my mother led the cheering. We always thought of FDR as having saved our home. The brutality of the Great Depression began to give way to a government of heart and hope, personified by President Roosevelt.

It is difficult to describe the emotional meaning of Franklin Roosevelt to our household. The New Deal was very personal, and the feeling among working people was that Franklin Roosevelt really cared, that he understood their difficulties and was determined to help solve problems that otherwise were insurmountable. With the advent of Hitler and Nazi Germany, FDR became something else: the shield against war and against the enemies of democracy. In 1936, I sat on my father’s shoulders as part of a torchlight parade for Roosevelt’s reelection. Rochester was a city that was divided by railroad tracks. On our side of the tracks, everyone was for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In 1939, I convinced my mother to take me to an I am an American rally. Eleanor Roosevelt was scheduled to speak. As the program concluded, I took my mother to the stage and captured Eleanor Roosevelt’s attention. She was tall, and she made you feel that she was really listening and was interested in what you were saying. I told her how much we admired her and appreciated her concern for us. She smiled the smile of someone amused by a young boy being so serious. Years later, when I knew Mrs. Roosevelt as a friend and political ally, I took some pleasure in telling her this story.

We never asked for or received any kind of public assistance. Some of our neighbors did receive welfare. We never questioned or begrudged their need. My sister, Jennie, and I did not think of ourselves as being poor at all. There was always food on the table. We were always neatly dressed. My parents made certain that we acted with respect and dignity. Time was a precious commodity, and we never wasted any of it in the streets—the playgrounds of our community, where there were fights and drinking and lots of baseball. My mother was very strict about how we used our time. We had to be home by a certain hour. There was a sense of discipline and purpose in our daily lives. Even though my parents were barely literate and knew nothing about classical music, we took advantage of every opportunity to attend concerts at school. We were strongly encouraged to read, study, and better ourselves. Jennie and I even played in the local Veterans of Foreign Wars drum and bugle corps, marching in the Memorial Day parade as part of the honor guard for James A. Hard, who became the last surviving combat veteran of the Grand Army of the Republic, the Union army of the Civil War.¹

As a child, I never had racial or religious or ethnic attitudes of bias or discrimination. Mayberry Street was a polyglot neighborhood. There were Italians, Irish, Dutch, Belgians, and Germans among the American families. Italians were the largest immigrant group. My best friend, Alphonse Ferrara, lived across the street. He was stricken with polio in the summer of 1938. I could hear his cries across the street at night. When he went to a sanitarium for rehabilitation, I bicycled to visit him as often as I could. A reputed member of the Mafia was our neighbor as well. He drove a Cadillac.

Rochester had prominent and significant African American families. Their children were in the public schools, where we all learned together of the heroism of Frederick Douglass, who had lived in Rochester, as the dramatic spokesman for the abolition of slavery. Jennie and I always accepted the invitation of the local African American church to participate in singing and poetry recitals. William Warfield, the distinguished singer who later married Leontyne Price, came from Rochester. His brother Murphy sat next to me in the orchestra, where we both played baritone horn.

We were brought up to accept people on their own terms. Skin color or religion or place of origin made no difference.

The trauma of my childhood was my parents’ separation in December 1938. Incredibly, it was related to the visit of my paternal grandfather, the only grandparent I ever met. He arrived in September, and in the three months that he spent with his children, he made religion the center of his concern. He chastised my father for marrying a Roman Catholic. He was unrelenting in preaching the fundamentalism of his own Calvinist background. I witnessed the searing cost of religious divisiveness.

My father, who became Catholic to marry my mother, was certainly not an observant member of the faith. My mother, a clear and open-minded person, carried the anticlericalism of Belgium to the New World. We attended church with my mother on Sundays, but when the priest insisted that we go to Catholic schools, my mother, without hesitation, rejected the thought, saying, We are Americans and my children will go to American schools.

In December, the religious storms unleashed by my grandfather’s presence became too much to bear. My father moved to a boardinghouse nearby, a few blocks from Mayberry Street. Jennie and I would go over to see him on weekends to take walks with him. One vivid scene that I always remember was the day before Christmas in 1938. My mother—in addition to the boardinghouse, in addition to all her labors—had a job as a cleaning woman in the factory where my brother Leo worked. Every Saturday afternoon she would spend four hours out at the factory, receiving $2 for cleaning up the offices. Leo, who worked six or seven days a week himself, had a 1934 Plymouth. It was Christmas Eve. My father had visited us, bringing little Christmas presents that ironically included a rosary for my mother. It was snowing. As Leo drove us away, I watched my father walking down the street alone as the sound of Christmas carols came from the car radio. I understood sadness on that day.

A week later, on New Year’s Eve, an icy, wintry night, my father went to visit his father at a relative’s home in Sodus, New York. My father fell on the steps of the porch. He was badly hurt, his skull fractured, and he became unconscious. Knowing nothing of medicine, the family simply carried him inside and laid him on the couch. By morning it was clear that he was very near death. He was taken to the hospital.

When my mother found out about the accident, she immediately took control of the situation. My father was near death, but my mother made it very clear that she was in charge and that he was going to recover. How she did it I do not know. My father slowly regained consciousness. We children kept the boardinghouse functioning. At last, my father came home. We were together again, all of us. I remember the happiness and emotion of that moment to this day. Their separation was never mentioned again.

My grandfather, who had been the source of such discord, returned to the Netherlands predicting that war would engulf the Continent within the year. He was killed in the Allied bombing of Breskens in 1941.

I was interested in government and politics from a very young age. I kept scrapbooks of the historical events that crowded those days. I had very strong feelings against Hitler before I was ten years old. My family did, too, certainly after the invasion of Holland and Belgium.

My parents were not involved in politics at all. When I was ten years old, I actively argued for Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection as president, talking to people while handing out literature supplied by the storefront headquarters for the FDR reelection campaign. I can remember, while I was still in grammar school, advocating support for Winston Churchill, who had become prime minister in May 1940. I would ask my mother or father to take me to America First rallies, where Charles Lindbergh or Senator Burton Wheeler denounced the president. How those audiences railed against FDR, and how I cheered him!

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the centerpiece of the world that held me in such thrall.

The arrival of war changed everything. The country was on a defense footing, with a tremendous demand for labor. The boardinghouse was no more. My mother enrolled in a special course as a lathe operator and took a job in a factory two blocks away from home. My father now had a steady job with the R.T. French Company. At the age of twelve, I worked as a machine tool apprentice. I always looked older than my age, so when I applied for the position the demand for labor was so sharp that no one questioned my credentials. My brother Camille joined the navy. My brother Leo moved to New Hampshire to operate a lumber mill. When possible, I walked the streets with my father at night, when he served as an air raid warden. People reported the slightest crack of light through closed curtains, presumably out of fear that enemy bombers might fly over Rochester on a mission to destroy our neighborhood. Our German neighbors, who had lived there for years, seemed to be reported for light violations more often than the others, although I could not see the difference. In any event, all of us were in motion.

Figure 1. With my parents, Joost and Alberta vanden Heuvel, 1945.

America, united in resolve, marched to victory. Looking back, we now know that 67 million people were killed, that cities and villages were destroyed and plundered, but that the forces of democracy joined with Soviet heroism won the war.

Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. We felt the loss with such anguish. A year later, marking the first anniversary of FDR’s death, Harry Truman came to Hyde Park to receive the Roosevelt estate as a gift to the nation. I was there, too. My high school class had collected funds to buy me a ticket to Hyde Park. My Latin teacher lent me her Brownie camera, and I had some money from working in the factory as an apprentice during the war. I took a train to Poughkeepsie and hitchhiked to nearby Hyde Park. I waited outside the gates as a group of eight young people walked in. I walked in with them. When I got to the house, the Secret Service came out and counted heads. The group were students from Franklin D. Roosevelt High School, there to be ushers during the ceremony. When they saw that I was the ninth person, and that I had a little paper bag with a sandwich, they asked who I was. I tried to explain. At that point, I spied Mrs. Roosevelt, who was walking from the main house with Fala, the president’s beloved Scottish terrier, to the Rose Garden. I ran over to her and said, Mrs. Roosevelt, I’ve come all this way from Rochester just to be here today. Please let me stay. She not only permitted me to stay but allowed me to join the other students in seating the guests and handing out the program of the official proceedings.

It was an extraordinary day. President Truman led the ceremonies. It seemed as though every memorable personality of the Roosevelt era was present. I captured this historic moment in part with the little Brownie camera.

The first phase of my life was over. I was confident in who I wanted to be. I was fifteen when a telegram arrived announcing my acceptance to Deep Springs College.

Deep Springs was as far removed from my Rochester